Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague who does such a wonderful job representing his constituency. He has given much of his career to helping people in the community, particularly the children and families in need. I commend him for all the work that he does.
The concern that my colleague quite properly raises has to do with a change in the language in the bill around obtaining warrants by the police for intercepting or preserving digital data. It uses a very curious phrase. It talks about police appearing before a judge and demonstrating that they have reasonable and probable grounds to suspect that a crime has been committed.
The normative word that has been used in this country for decades for a normal warrant is to appear before a judge and demonstrate that one has reasonable and probable grounds to believe that a crime has been committed. The change of the word “believe” to “suspect” has some meaning. Civil liberty and privacy groups are concerned that this would be a reduction in the standard that police would need to demonstrate before they got an order.
Again, we are dealing with very sensitive material here. We are dealing with people's digital lives, their emails and the websites that they are visiting. This gets to the heart of a person's communications. My colleague from the Bloc made an analogy to Canada Post. This is our mail and our personal communications.
While all Canadians have an interest in ensuring we have effective tools to ensure we are not abusing those tools to commit crimes, we need to ensure there are rock solid lines drawn in the sand to ensure that anybody who is intercepting that material has demonstrated to someone in a judicial capacity that there are reasonable and probable grounds to warrant having that privacy interfered with.
That is why New Democrats have been working to understand why this change has been made in that bill and to understand what impact it may have. If it results in a diminution of Canadians' privacy rights with respect to their digital lives, we will oppose that change.